Savitri joins the eager crowd that heard
the brilliant Summoner’s call. She is here now, amongst us, foregoing her
majesty and her great world of happiness; she is here in this small dingy place
to pursue her ageless undertaking, the task pertaining to this mortal creation.
She has condescended to pass through the portals of the heavy and sullen birth,
the birth that is a perpetual death. She is here where death is a mechanism for
the progress of life. But this ought to end. She is here to terminate that
process and make life grow by the true truth of life, that is, by love. She is
here among the tribes of men lifting up the burden of their harsh and toilsome
fate, the primordial fate that in fact, if time has come, must undergo a
transformative change. Her coming marks the arrival of that moment. She rejects
not the human plight and the travail, the ignominy of mortality—and she does it
with full understanding of the issues involved, yet succumbing not to the
degradation associated with them.
The second section of the Symbol
Dawn opens with the description of Savitri’s entering into the human field, the
divine Goddess making a purposeful decision to change things by identifying
herself with them. She comes but she does not live here in constrained time, with
wearied thought, sans love and light. Unless she would bear the heavy yoke of ignorance
and death, how could she remove that heavy yoke of ignorance and death? Nor is
this identification of hers with this world of ignorance and death a
sham—because such identification would leave things essentially as they were in
the beginning. Her assumption of humanity is the sign for finding redemption
for humanity. She must work out things entirely from within, by living in her
soul and her spirit. The greatness of human Savitri is, she holds within her the
divine Savitri.
The mystery of her birth is that,
while she assumes in their trueness the conditions of the ignorant mortal lot,
her divine self suffers not any diminution in the process. The veil of thick
darkness is there and it fully covers it, but the divine self, the inner light
shines steadily underneath it. Something is always there deeply aware within
and in it is the certainty of her accomplishing things in the mortal birth. The
psychic flame, the spiritual fire, the occult might are always present, undiminished
even in the obscurity of the terrestrial nature, in the human mind and the
human heart and the human mould. The supreme Nature was once Savitri’s native joyous
nature. But now she carries in her bosom the anguish of the gods, she carries the
heavenly concern for the mortal creature. The concern is of the deathless being
conquered by the death of things. This cannot remain so if life has to grow by
love.
In her there
was the anguish of the gods.
But what exactly is the anguish the gods carry? Powers of light and knowledge,
they the gods are there to guide man on the path of the divine. They do that,
because in them is the anguish to take man to the divine, to make more and more
the entries of the divine in man possible. It is by that anguish that they
themselves grow.
But, in the meanwhile, things here are different. Neil Gaiman’s American
Gods has a few interesting as well as motivating anxieties, even perplexing
anxieties. In the novel he depicts his great Shadow meeting a Modern God named
"Media", implying that we now worship The Media instead of Old Gods.
That reminds him of "The Fat Kid" who represents Technology, the kid
turning out to be cold-hearted and ruthless but insecure and neurotic. The Gods
live in a town where there isn't a single bookstore. What a pity! And there the
dreamy gawky wizards, the we-all-know scifi-sts speak of a book titled Gravity's
Rainbow. How is that rainbow built? But that doesn’t matter, because that
is not the issue on hand. What matters is that, that gravity’s rainbow does
give scare to the very Ancient Gods, scare as much to the New Gods also, the à
la mode Gods. And this is perfectly understandably—that being its nature.
But the gods, ancient or modern, come in various denominations, and one has to
be quite wary of the nether Lords. Gaiman’s older gods award a dark feel and
the new ones have no light with them. If the gods of infra-rationality are
blood-thirsty, the modern are stiff-necked and arrogantly obstinate with their
dubious convictions and proud noses. Very often we persuade ourselves of being
right and insist that there is required no intruder to meddle into our affairs,
maintain that we are ourselves the hewers of the path of our destiny, the
unknown path of progress and prosperity, that we are the forerunners and
winners of the human race, needing none else to help us.
We have the Gods of Science and Industry, and the Gods of Commerce, and these
Gods don’t care about Ecology and the destruction of the Planet; we have a God
presiding over the Flat World and Tom Friedman of NYT is his priest; we have
the God of Techno-Capitalists charting out the way of the future for us; we
have the Gods of Fundamentalists of various hues and shapes, religious,
scientific, rationalistic, political, demagogic, and who and what and what not.
We must therefore hunt out weapons of mass destruction which don’t exist,
because we have made up our mind against somebody as our enemy, because we want
to grab his wealth. If these lethal weapons are not found, it isn’t the proof that they
don’t exist. And who cares for life?
The story of concentration camps and gas chimneys during the Second World War
is a gruesome story, putting the clock of civilisation before by several dark
centuries and millennia, putting the gods to shame. “Mankind, jewel of God’s
creation, succeeded in building an inverted Tower of Babel, reaching not toward
heaven but toward an anti-heaven, there to create a parallel society, a new
‘creation’ with its own princes and gods, laws and principles, jailers and
prisoners.” The child in hiding with his mother asks softly, very softly:
"Can I cry now?" It seemed as impossible to conceive of Auschwitz
with God as to conceive of
Never shall I forget that night,
the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times
sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small
faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent
sky.
Never shall I forget those flames
that consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal
silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments
that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams into ashes.
Never shall I forget those things
even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.
Never.
Where is then the anguish of the gods? Where is it? Or are they asleep? Are
they comfortably, deeply, tamasically asleep, eternally asleep in their
blissful heaven?
Or is the anguish deeper yet, unfathomably deep, making
…terrible agencies the Spirit
allows
And there are subtle and enormous
Powers
That shield themselves with the
covering Ignorance.
Offspring of the gulfs, agents of
the shadowy Force,
Haters of light, intolerant of
peace,
Aping to the thought the shining
Friend and Guide,
Opposing in the heart the eternal
Will,
They veil the occult uplifting
Harmonist.
His wisdom's oracles are made our
bonds;
The doors of God they have locked
with keys of creed
And shut out by the Law his
tireless Grace.
(Savitri, p. 225)
This must cause concern to the best of the gods, the bright gods, the tireless Helpers
on the Way of the Future, the Shapers to a great extent of the Human Destinies.
But Savitri’s concern is at the foundational level itself, at the root of this
creation itself.
In fact The Symbol Dawn strikes the first note about this fundamental
concern itself, and strikes it in a striking manner. And what is beautiful or significant
about it is, the concern is in the transcendental. It is not that the gods have
come into cosmic play and are showing concern, that things are perhaps beyond
them to mend them. Everything is seen in the transcendental—the repeated coming
of the divine Dawn, her pouring the gifts of the revelation and the flame, her iridescence
and her glory, her magnificent hues, her sowing the seeds of grandeur in the
hour, everything is happening in the transcendent. Among these human tribes
Savitri’s awakening too is in the transcendent. She recognizes, over there, the
heaviness of the task lying ahead of her. All this, including the false
realities of this world, are mirrored over there. The death of Styavan in the
prime of his youth is already mirrored in that world of deathless immortality,
mirrored fathomlessly. It is to this aspect of the mortal creation that Savitri
first awakes in the transcendent. With it she is set to take the mortal birth.
But this mortal birth which has
already occurred in the transcendental can materialise here, upon earth, in the
earthly process, only if a prayer is sent to that transcendental Savitri. But
who is going to send that prayer to her? And is she going to oblige to the
prayer of any lesser person? But it is the divine Purusha himself who has to
invoke her birth, has to demand it, has to compel it. He comes as Aswapati, and
does the needed qualifying tapasya, testing its validity in every manner, its
needed efficacy at every step, even maintaining the record of his yoga. In that
respect, he is not just a pathfinder; he is much more than that. He is actually
the path-breaker; he is the strong forerunner, the hewer of the ways of
immortality in the mortal creation, on this mŗtyuloka.
In response to his ardent, in fact forceful prayer the divine Savitri agrees to
take the mortal birth. In that birth she remembers the anguish the gods of the
transcendental creation, it carried by them in their deep souls. As human
Savitri, aware of it, of that anguish of the gods, occult-yogically she prepares
herself to remove it. The felicitous measure of that fulfilment is the measure
in the will of the transcendental divine. Whatever has to happen will therefore
happen in the supreme Will alone. That is her sun which illumines her way in
the cosmic darkness.
It must be appreciated that the
entire Exordium of Savitri is set in
the Transcendental. The difficulty in the march of this creation, with the mind
of Night standing across the path of the divine Event, the aspects of two
primordial Nothingnesses, the mystery of the fathomless, the absolute Zero, the
repeated appearance of the divine Dawn and her work remaining half done,—everything
is happening over there. The appearance of the Dawn is first in the
transcendental sky, and therefore what is described here, in the opening canto
of Savitri, is the illustrious symbol
of that marvellous Dawn; the epic begins with the Symbol Dawn for us in which
the symbol is for the reality that is set into truth-movement in that high
domain of truth and beauty and joy and awareness and love. Which means that, to
introduce the poem to us, it is not quite the technique of the flashback that
the poet is using here; it is a description of the beginning of the Beginning
occurring elsewhere. It is not Horace’s in media res, into the middle of
things, the act of plunging into middle of the story; but it is narrating the
story which begins at the beginning, ab initio or ab ovo, from the
mature ovule, from the egg. Because it is first happening in the high
transcendental, there is in it the certitude, the absoluteness of it being
victoriously accomplished here. The breaking out of the Dawn in the
transcendental is what is presented to us as the Symbol Dawn.